Spanish lawyer Rosario Porto and her journalist husband, Alfonso Basterra, adopted a baby, Asunta Fong Yang, from China in June 2001. The couple came from an upper-middle-class family, and the adoption raised no suspicions.
Asunta, who the couple raised in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, has shown herself to be intellectually gifted over the years, skipping school grades and taking multiple extra classes in English, French, Chinese, German and other languages.
Asunta’s adoptive mother, Rosario Porto, began suffering serious mental health problems in 2009, with thoughts of suicide, which led her to spend two nights in a psychiatric hospital and be discharged after two days.
Basterra and Porto divorced in early 2013, as the mother was having difficulties due to the death of both parents and had just become involved in an affair with businessman Manuel García, which caused the marriage to fall apart.
This triggered another mental breakdown in Porto in June 2013, prompting Basterra to help her return home. The couple began eating meals with each other again, which led them to consider moving back in together.
On the night of September 21, 2013, shortly after 10 p.m., Asunta was reported missing by her parents, after being seen on security cameras walking between her mother and father’s houses earlier that day, for around 5pm.
Porto told police that he had left Asunta doing homework at his house while she was at the family’s country house in Teo that day. She returned home at night and found no sign of Asunta, who was never the type to run away.
Asunta’s corpse was found the next day on a road, on September 22, and was quickly identified due to missing person reports.
After the closed circuit television images did not match Porto’s account of the events, she was arrested for her daughter’s murder at the funeral on September 24, and Basterra received the same treatment a day later.
A coroner who examined Asunta concluded that she died of asphyxiation after consuming at least 27 Lorazepam pills that day, which was the same medication Porto was taking and was more than nine times a “high dosage” for an adult.
Where is Alfonso Baterra today?
When the trial of Rosario Porto and Alfonso Basterra finally took place in October 2015, the jury concluded that they were both guilty. Each received an 18-year prison sentence on charges of aggravated murder with aggravating family circumstances and abuse of authority.
The Galicia Superior Court of Justice would change the verdict in May 2016, after ruling that it could not be proven that Basterra was present in the car taking Asunta to the country house where she was killed.
However, it was still agreed that he had planned and collaborated in the murder, and the 18-year sentence was upheld.
Basterra is still imprisoned today in Teixeiro prison in A Coruña, Spain, where he is serving his 18-year sentence, which will end in 2033.
In the 2017 documentary Lo que la verdad conceal: El caso Asunta, Basterra wrote letters to producers (via Radio Times) in which he shared his “firm intention to disappear” to “reunite with [sua] girl”.
“When I regain my freedom, I have the firm intention of disappearing, no one will hear from me again, not even Rosario Porto. I have only one reason to stay alive, and that is none other than to be a free man again and to be reunited with my girl like never before. In fact, I’ve already thought about the how and the where, I just need the when, but everything comes.”
Porto was imprisoned in the Brieva penitentiary, in Ávila, and made several suicide attempts over the years. She was eventually found dead and hanged in her prison cell on November 18, 2020, at the age of 50.
The Asunta Case is available on Netflix.
